I've gotten a lot of blog mileage from a recent visit back to my hometown of Chicago, so why stop now? Chicago has always been known for great design, architecture, and near miraculous engineering feats - when the river became a bit too stinky, they simply reversed the direction of its flow so it fed to the Mississippi.
Below are a few images I took to capture the city's creative, progressive and dramatic design essence. Some are a bit abstract. Can you identify their origin?
Images from top: (1 and 2) Helmut Jahn's colorful corridor installation at Ohare International Airport. (3) Rooftop of trainport at Union Station. (4) Glass window high-rise along Wacker drive. (5) Drawbridge along the South Loop section of the Chicago River. (6) Steps to the "El" train in the South Loop at Harrison Lasalle Street. (7) Design pattern on ceiling inside Union Station. (8) Great Hall at Union Station. (9) Union Station's grand Art Deco entrance-way. (10) Cars underneath the "El" tracks along Harrison Street. All images by Douglas DeMers, free to use via cc license 1.0.
A few years back National Geographic tagged Philadelphia as "the next great city." In many ways, it already is. Here in Fishtown there's electricity in the air, new businesses are starting up, the gears of creativity are turning, and people here - once known for being the workshop for the world - are thinking local, while acting global. This year why not skip gift-shopping at the mall and take a stroll down Girard Avenue? Be a locasumer.
One great place to start is a new little coffee shop/record store named Milkcrate Cafe, at the corner of Columbia and Girard. Being a collector of vintage vinyl and a coffee guzzler, the concept alone was enough to peak my interest. But what really impressed me was the cool design feature of having an entire wall of colorful, collectible record covers serve as the main focal point for the cafe's decor. The rest of the interior is fairly minimal and mod, which helps balance the colorful, dazzling mosaic of albums.
Owner Adam Porter hails from a legacy work in multi-media oriented coffee houses such as Chicago's notorious Earwax, as well as notable cafes in down in the bustle New Orleans. He also put in some DJ time at Philadelphia's renowned Five Spot club, which closed due to fire years ago, a legacy woefully remembered by the club crowd.
The records at Milkcrate are all for purchase, including a vast business of online sales of funk, jazz, soul, rock and rarities from their dynamic website. And the coffee is from Philadelphia's great La Colombe coffee - my favorite of the city's gourmet coffee roasters.
Though only at lift-off stage now, plans for the shop include an extensive food menu and expansion of the record store into the downstairs level, as well as turntables spun for entertainment.
From the looks of the record collection I may not be needing to order from Dusty Groove to get my fill of rare soul.
UpCycle
Speaking of groove, just few blocks down the street is the VGroove studio of artist and lampmaker Victor Perez and his "upcycled" handmade skateboard lamps.
Victor makes some very moderne-looking lamp sculptures utilizing old skateboards. He cuts them apart, sands them down, reassembles, and retrofits, until they become something quite extraordinary - not really looking like skateboards anymore, though one can still sense their original essence. His one-of-a-kind lamps have been the buzz around Fishtown lately, with his work appearing in variety of area shows.
His lamps will be on exhibit this weekend in a show with friends at his studio on 306 East Girard in Fishtown.
Fishtown Airways
A block or so further down is the Fishtown Airways artist collective and market, which proffers a plethora of works from local artists and artisans. Here you can find truly unique art items, crafts, and accessories that definitely wont be on the racks or in bins of mass produced crud at the mall. Fishtown Airways opened up earlier this summer and has generated an offshoot gallery called Piranha Betty's Art Market on 2472 Frankford Avenue.
Johnny Brendas
Kitty-corner from Fishtown Airways, you can rest from your days worth of locasumer activity and grab a bite to eat at Johnny Brenda's, one of the area's hubs for good food, brew, and entertainment. Have a pint of Kenzinger from the Philadelphia Brewing Company, made blocks away in nearby Kensington, and with hops provided by (in some batches) the neighborhood's urban green spot, Greensgrow Farms. And while you're there at JB's, stick around and see one of Philly's great local bands perform in the upstairs concert hall, which has become a primary venue for the music scene...
Wow, this sure sounds like fun, and all with a carbon footprint the size of my little toe. See you there! --D.A. DeMers
Not long ago I attended a gallery event at Philadelphia's Fishtown Airways artist collective on Girard Ave, (now apparently splintered off into Piranha Betty's Art Market, at another location on Frankford Ave). Outside was a table featuring the playful, colorful robot paintings of local artist Evan Cairo. I was captivated by the work, and bought one of the paintings. I recall the artist saying his robots were "a lot like humans." They do seem that way...nice humans.
Evan Cairo
I placed the robot painting on a shelf in my bedroom. Each day I woke up and looked at it. As time went by, I began feeling a bit strange. It was as if a sensor had been activated within me, a circuit flipped on.
It's difficult to remember the events that followed, but one vivid occurrence remains - there was a constant pulsating flash of images in my mind, specifically of childhood memories. For days I scrambled to find similar representations of those images. I knew they were in the house somewhere - perhaps they were in books, maybe drawings I'd done, objects I'd collected.
Japanese toy robot.
Soon enough boxes had been plundered through, drawers tossed about, papers scattered everywhere. I didn't sleep or eat until I found what I needed...or maybe, what I was being commanded to find. Was it Evan's robot that was directing me? I couldn't be sure.
Whatever it was, it had gotten out of hand, especially for my wife, Anne, who'd been away during all this. I recall hearing the front door open, her calling my name, and then footsteps clacking as she slowly walked up our wood stairs to the attic where I was secluded. There I sat crouched on the floor, a three day beard on my face, everything in shambles, and showing a frenzied, maddened grin. In my hands was a shoe-box filled with little toys. The robots of my youth. The wonderful human-like droids that had inspired me to create and design my own universe.
Anne didn't exactly share the same euphoria for my re-found stuff, at least not right then. One reason could've been because dinner guests were due within the hour, and the house looked like a nor-easter had blown by. I quickly found myself wearing that special shoe-box on my head and heard a cursing emitted of which only humans are capable.
Japanese toy rocketship.
But the point is that robots have stirred the human immagination for eras. The tale above might include a smidge of fantasy, nonetheless, these mechanical beings were an unequivocal force in my aspiration to make art and to eventually become a product designer. People tend to personify machines. Possibly it's just a childlike nostalgia for playing with toys.
Or perhaps it's something deeper and universally compelling, something long embedded in the human psyche - a desire to bring to life things that are by nature unanimated, cold, and non-human. Whichever the case, that fascination still glows within me today...sort of like, well, a flickering LED light. --D.A DeMers
Below: robot-like "Moon Rover" task lamp I designed in 2004. My company proffered it to Crate and Barrel's mod furnishings company, CB2, during a meeting at the IHFC's High Point Market. They rejected it... I actually made the prototype by hand.
Below: dog and elephant toy robots, circa 1960s. Anonymous.
Recently I was looking through an old magazine and out plopped some photos of lamps that I thought were long lost. There's a story linked to them worth telling, so here goes...
Wicker Park Chicago in the 90's was not unlike Greenwich Village in the 60's. The cafes, lounges, and parties resonated with the constant chatter of creative ideas. Music, art, literature, and youth culture had converged on this locale, and in the air was a tremendous zeitgeist shared by everyone, a sense that something quite amazing was happening...and things did.
That's all over now. And I have exiled myself to Philly, where that same spirit of creativity is beginning to burn brightly (and likewise so does the spirit of a world champion baseball team). Wicker Park now seems nothing but a faraway planet of unauthentic-looking chain bars, ubiquitous trendy restaurants, and stretches of hastily slapped together yuppie condos. Dorothy Parker's famous quote is fitting: "there's no there there."
But for one particular moment in time, it was a special place. And being one who experienced the apex of that moment, I was motivated to do many artistic endeavors. Playing music and being in a variety of bands was one, but more offbeat, perhaps, was the compulsion to make things, especially lamps.
It started with an odd curiosity and study of the "birdmen" who built flying machines in the early 1900s. They seemed particularly fascinating, since many of them had no prior experience with such engineering, yet risked death to see if their contraptions would succeed. The human desire to fly is a legacy steeped in mythology, linked back to humankind's first ambitions. It's the consummate metaphor for freedom on many levels - the dream to defy the shackles of gravity, whatever that may represent...I often felt that gravity profoundly.
When electricity became usable to consumers, many designers, engineers, and architects found an alluring new technology with which to work. From the Arts and Crafts era to Art Deco, a plethora of imaginative lighting designs were created, designs that greatly influenced my flight into this enticing realm. The French-based Desny design group and lamp artists such as Kola Moser of the Austrian Weiner Werkstaette offered some of the more compelling lighting treasures, utilizing crome and glass in ways that explored their dazzling reflective and refractive properties. There's a magical sense working with an object that emits light that one doesn't quite feel when making a chair or table.
I was drawn to that magic with a child's sense of wonder. I did everything possible to learn how to make such fascinating objects. I learned welding, silver-smithing and jewelry-making, studied design from every aspect, and in 1995 opened an art metalwork and lamp shop called Birdman Studios in the flat-iron arts building at the corners of Milwaukee Ave., North, and Damen - the heart of Wicker Park.
I used whatever materials I could find - reclaimed gas pipes, old cast-iron fittings, discarded sheets of copper, steel, or aluminum. I experimented with all types of glass, then mica, plastic, whatever. So obsessed had I become with these luminous creations that friends seemed more than a bit concerned. I had transformed into, well, a "birdman".
It was difficult to explain how personal these projects had become - they were like my offspring. I recall one crowning moment, an exhaustive late night when I sat back in that little urban studio, sweat and grease smeared across my brow, and gazed at the warm, glowing spectacle of my family of little lamps. I gave so much of myself to making them, and they gave back such a satiable sense of fulfillment and magic...yes magic. I never wanted to let them go.
However, economics is often a buzzkill for artistic passion, and so my wife Anne and I eventually schlepped the creations to gift shows, art fairs, community events, held open studios, did anything and everything to make a living selling those things. Finally I was picked up by an artisan rep who schlepped them for me, and to some very prominent home furnishings and gift shows in New York, Chicago, and Atlanta. Soon enough the lamps found proper homes in museum shops, including New York's MoMa, the Walker Center in Minneapolis, and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.
It was quite an unlikely roll of events from there on. One day I got an offer from a major international men's lifestyle magazine to be featured in their series on "cool" lamps (it's still questionable whether my studio was the original intended destination for the reporter's inquiry or whether the lead was actually meant to be for somebody more notable down the hall from me...oops).
In any case, I was the lucky benefactor, and they chose my sculptural hand-forged aluminum "Moonstation" lamp to be featured in the magazine, juxtaposed with an assortment of non-alike creations by other makers. That exposure, along with a linked mention on NBC's Today Show, would change everything. I received an influx of calls for orders - more than I could possibly execute on my own. Desperate for resolution, I approached a local lamp manufacturer about the possibility of getting them mass-produced.
Instead, I wound up becoming a product designer for the lamp company and for the next decade designed lamps and furniture for some very big retail stores, including Lowes, Target, and Pottery Barn, and in doing so, traveled the world like Marco Polo from China to India to Paris - a mission this humble, small-time lampmaker who began from a tiny studio in Chicago found impossible not to undertake.
I never returned to making one-of-a-kind lamps by hand, something I regret as the years roll by... Perhaps someday, though, the Birdman will fly again.
Above is a page from the March 1999 issue Maxim Magazine that featured one of my lamps. Below are pics I recently found of some of the handmade lamps of the Birdman Studio years 1995-1999. I believe friends still own a few of the firsts. I sure would love to see a snapshot or two of those, if at all possible.
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